UL to host third health care app contest

Cory Etheredge, a member of the winning student team at Cajun Code Fest in 2013, demonstrates how to use the smartphone app she and teammate Anh Do created during the 27-hour health care coding competition.(Photo11:
Megan Wyatt, The Advertiser
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Cory Etheredge is not the person you might expect to win a highly competitive coding competition.

She’s smart, sure, but Etheredge knows little about coding and instead earned a degree in kinesiology from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

But it was her expertise in human movement, not coding, that gave her team the upper hand in last year’s CajunCodeFest 3.0.

“I didn’t think we would win,” Etheredge said. “Not because we weren’t a well-put-together team. We were the only team that met each other the day the competition began, and we just put something together.”

Etheredge remembers the three-day, 27-hour coding competition being filled with computer science majors and computer engineers who had dual monitors attached to large computers.

Comparatively, her sole teammate, Anh Do, a student coder, working from a small laptop seemed inconsequential.

“I think everybody else was a little surprised that we won, too,” Etheredge said. “I think it was because I actually had a grasp of health and fitness principles in general. The other teams would present and say that their app would help people be more active, whereas I had American Heart Association standards incorporated, and people felt that I knew what I was talking about.”

Etheredge and Do, who called themselves Team Geaux KNEAS, won the student division of CajunCodeFest and prize money of $2,500 for the design of a smartphone app that can help heart disease patients track heart rate during exercise in order to return to a baseline level of health.

David Bellar, interim director of the School of Kinesiology, served as the faculty adviser for Team Geaux KNEAS during the competition.

“I think it was a good experience of practical application of knowledge,” Bellar said. “It’s one thing to acquire knowledge through lecture courses. It’s another to take it and apply it to a field we normally don’t get exposed to.”

Innovative thinkers and programmers are being called upon once again for this year’s CajunCodeFest 3.0, which will be held April 23-25 at the Cecil J. Picard Center for Child Development and Lifelong Learning in the university’s research park.

This year’s theme is Aging in Place, which seeks apps and software that can help the elderly to safely live at home.

“We’re really excited about the opportunities that can spawn off of this Aging in Place theme,” said Andrea Aloisio, CajunCodeFest organizer and external affairs manager for the UL Center for Business and Information Technologies.

“For senior citizens who do not want to enter nursing homes, this technology could help them live comfortably in their own homes again.”

The CajunCodeFest event is put on by UL’s School of Business and Information Technologies and is part of Innov8 Lafayette, a festival of innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship.

CajunCodeFest 3.0 began in 2012 and has since attracted national and international attention.

In 2012, the Childhood Obesity theme of CajunCodeFest attracted 275 competitors from three countries and 15 states and resulted in startup interests and one product launch.

In 2013, the Own Your Own Health theme attracted more than 400 competitors from two countries and 12 states and resulted in more than 6.6 million Medicaid claims being released by Louisiana.

CajunCodeFest is free to enter and is open to all college students and professional programmers, software developers, designers, engineers, educators, health care professionals, marketing and business strategists and entrepreneurs.

Six winning teams earned cash and prizes valued at $52,000 during the 2013 competition, including a $25,000 grand prize.

“If you have an idea, but you don’t have the means, there are plenty of people out there who code for a living who are more than willing and are happy to work with somebody who has an idea,” Etheredge said. “Often, they don’t have the idea, but they have the skills to make the idea a reality.”

Learn more

What: CajunCodeFest 3.0

When: April 23-25

Where: Picard Center in University Research Park

Cost: Free, but registration is limited and required

More information: cajuncodefest.org, info@cajuncodefest.org or 337-482-0627